Books are a uniquely portable magic. ~ Stephen King

Monday, April 5, 2010

Everything's Better

Memoir Monday

One day when I was very young we were having a typical family dinner when my father literally fell out of his chair in sudden pain. He was on all fours beside the table and the pain was so intense it had rendered him speechless. It was the sort of pain that should have been really scary for two little girls to witness.

But it wasn't.

Because we were two excessively silly little girls.

As my mother jumped from her seat in a panic to call an aunt over to watch us while she took my father to the hospital, we danced around his helpless form like we were performing a pagan ritual. We were giggling uncontrollably and dancing when my mother re-entered the room; too panic stricken to deal with our inappropriate behavior. She told my dad she'd reached one of his sisters and as soon as she arrived they'd head for the hospital. He nodded weakly in response.

My aunt arrived quickly to watch us.

Which was not surprising.

We were delightful.

As the story goes, when they arrived at the emergency room, my mother helped the nurses undress my father and get him into a hospital gown. His skin was quite ashen, which surprised no one; what DID surprise them was the huge quantity of small white particles that fell from his skin as they freed him from his clothing. He was, at this point, still in too much pain to explain.

The doctors did their examination and quickly determined that he'd had a gall bladder attack. They did emergency surgery immediately and it was quite successful. As he recovered, they relayed to him their questions about the white stuff that had fallen from his clothing hours earlier in the ER.

"Those damn kids..."

"The kids? What did the kids have to do with it?"

You see, my father had been on a low sodium diet for some time preceding this incident. When my mother made adjustments to her cooking to accommodate his dietary needs, my sister and I didn't like the way anything tasted any more. When we complained, she always told us, "A little salt makes everything better."

You see where this is going, right?

Along with laughing and dancing around him, we were sprinkling him rather liberally with the salt shaker while chanting, "Salt makes everything better!"

Good thing my mom wasn't a proponent of the "everything's better with butter" school of thought...

3 comments:

  1. Omg!! You were silly little girls!! Cute story!!

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  2. What Gayle said! That was EXACTLY what I was going to say.

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  3. OMG, if you guys were my girls, I would have killed you! Then I would have laughed! Then I would have poured myself a nice glass of wine...

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